Much of our current understanding of the childhood obesity crisis comes from highly respected institutions. To pick a random example, after research was done at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, the authors made suggestion …

In the Netherlands, only 4% of the children are overweight, according to NBC News. Apparently the source is the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, although a visit to their data visualization page seems to indicate that the percentage is 17.2 …

A report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gave the disturbing news that obesity rates continue to link up with income inequality. A Harvard research team found that obesity is decreasing in teenagers from well-educated (and …

Sometimes a headline accidentally sums up everything that’s going on in the world at the moment. Such a headline is “Severe obesity in US children on the rise, multipronged solution needed.” That says it all. The main message is, “All classes of obesit …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the work of sociologist Philip N. Cohen, author of “The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change.” A traditional breadwinner-homemaker family is one where the father has a job and the mother stays home …

The post-WWII “baby boom” generation learned to read from textbooks starring Dick and Jane, a pair of siblings who also had a little sister, a mother and father, a cat and a dog. Over the past half-century, families have changed, and consequently, hous …

Mothers need to be sensitive, and toddlers need to feel emotionally secure. If these factors are not in place, the child is at risk of being obese by age 15. This was a conclusion reached in the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which en …

Stacy-Ann Gooden, who writes for BabyCenter.com, told her readers about an Australian study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, indicating that overprotective mothers are “associated with a 13 percent increase in the odds of children being overweight o …

A team at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, looking for answers about depression, learned something new that could make a difference to childhood obesity, specifically, an exciting revelation about motivation and mood regulation. Principal investi …

“Design” is a term that has always drawn an emotional response, whether positive or negative, and it makes a difference at every level of life’s activities, starting first thing in the morning. What size should a breakfast cereal bowl be? Big enough to …

In the endeavor to reduce childhood obesity — at least far enough that it can no longer be considered an epidemic — long-term change is what one journalist called “the brass ring.” For readers unfamiliar with the concept, the brass ring is the prize …

To achieve durable change and sustained weight loss, kids need a lot of buttressing, a lot of outside support, and what’s more, they need the right kind of support. Anything that sounds like nagging will be rebuffed and have the opposite effect from wh …

The first study to focus on pediatric long-term weight control using the socio-ecological model was conducted by Dr. Denise Wilfley. The basis is cognitive behavioral therapy. The research team concluded that, even after a successful weight loss progra …

We have seen that cognitive behavioral therapy comes in several flavors and that it can be quite successful in promoting behavioral change by breaking negative behavior cycles and restructuring harmful patterns. Appetitive traits are vulnerabilities li …

In the field of sociology, the social environment pretty much includes everything that isn’t nature. In the field of psychology, here is one definition: Social environment of an individual is the culture that he or she was educated and/or lives in, and …

Why can’t some children resist temptation? Why can’t most of them understand that it’s better to have a larger reward later than a smaller reward now? Why is it that, for some kids, whatever goes in the eyes (like a TV commercial for junk food) also go …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the different varieties of cognitive behavioral therapy. The biggest stumbling block, in these or any modalities, is longevity. Something may work for six months or a year, or while attention is focused on the …

In the short term, many obesity interventions achieve an encouraging degree of success, but a year or five years later, a follow-up shows a different picture. As Childhood Obesity News has described, cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT is designed to p …

In the areas of weight management and eating disorders in kids and teens, several different components are involved. Negative behavior cycles need to be broken, and patterns need to be restructured. Some behaviors need to be eliminated, and others put …

The National Institutes of Health website offers a succinct definition of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its usefulness: CBT is the most established psychological treatment for BN (bulimia nervosa) and BED (binge eating disorder), with demonstrated e …

Attention modification training (AMT) has been employed with children before, to treat anxiety and a number of other mental health issues. One of its most important uses is the treatment of substance abuse problems. Since food is a widely abused substa …

A few years ago, European countries tried something that seemed to work for a moment in time, then fell apart. Kellogg was one of the giant companies, along with Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, that made a voluntary pledge to not market unhealthful food prod …

In his examination of the life of novelist and MacArthur Fellow David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max noted, “With the help of researchers, Wallace assembled hundreds of pages of research on boredom, trying to understand it at an almost neurological level.” ” …

Boredom is a subject not often addressed, maybe because it is so boring. What can be said about it? More often than not, boredom leads to trouble. As we know from social media, a large number of adolescent communications begin with “I was bored, so I.. …

Depression can be caused by interpersonal difficulties, and can in turn can cause further difficulties in getting along with other people. For people prone to overeating, this can result in a vicious cycle where social malaise causes unhealthy eating p …

Childhood Obesity News has been looking at the school-based intervention program Pathways to Health, which grew out of the risk-behavior reduction program known as PATHS. Pathways to Health is all about sharpening and strengthening Executive Cognitive …

The idea of Kellogg as a sponsor is complicated because several different entities are involved. Yesterday, Childhood Obesity News mentioned the many programs backed by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In the 2013 fiscal year, the foundation gave away $259 …

When the journal Childhood Obesity started up, with financial sponsorship from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Fat Boy Thin Man author Michael Prager got in touch with the publisher and expressed concern about the dual role filled by the foundation’s vice …

Childhood Obesity News has raised the question of how a typical academic figure can manage to carry out duties related to health policy while in the employ of manufacturers of products whose qualities are not aligned with the public good. Many experts …

When prominent academic figures are on corporate payrolls, and when corporations finance groups whose mission is to end childhood obesity, alarm bells ring in the minds of vigilant observers — in some cases, alarm bells that have tolled very many time …